A reappearance of Black Diamond Racing?

The felt pads on the Supers should be removed for best results. The pads slow energy transfer audibly, can you believe it? 😳

This is a good lesson for the newbies how audiophiles sometimes get carried away with things. Once they commit to an idea there’s no stopping them! 🔙 The same thing happens to lead as a filler or support or node damper or whatever. It seems like such a good idea, right? Not too soft, not too hard. And SONEX. 🤮 And room treatment in general. Foam padding in chairs. Sorbothane. Gawd! Look, I did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday and have evaluated all manner of cones, including the BDR Cones for ages, at least going back more than twenty years.

I have an advantage, admittedly, since I evaluated various materials & cones in conjunction with my advanced isolation stands including the sub-Hertz Nimbus platform. Now, one big advantage to being able to evaluate cones under the platform and cones under the component is all the differences are much more obvious in the context of component isolation and the drawbacks of certain materials are more obvious. The super hard DH Cones from Golden Sound outperform BDR cones hands down, it’s not really close. Very hard materials beat relatively softer materials every time. And the DH Squares, graphite composite and DH Shelves also outperform BDR shelves. The NASA grade ceramics are analogous to Rafa Nadal on clay. Nobody comes close.

Lead is the sort of material audiophiles instantly fall in love 🥰 with. Not too hard. Not too soft. 😬

“Geoff disapproves of lead.”

You can say that again. Where lead is the most obvious for anyone who’s never figured it out, the bass gets all messed up, unnatural sounding and glumpy. It’s one of the very worst materials ever foisted on young naive audiophiles. It even happened to Pierre at Mapleshade and yes very far from naive. He used a ton of it at the shows. He even had a guy on staff who’s duty it was to make sure all the lead arrived at the Shows. Of course, when you look at my scheme how materials sound, from best to worst, according to hardness guess which material brings up the rear!

Do I detect a typo or something in that last post? 🤔

Never got off on em. It wasn’t due to lack of trying, either. I find BDR cones to be toward the bottom of my short list with NASA grade ceramics at the top. I have found extremely hard cones sound best, more open and more dynamic and more natural, whereas relatively soft materials sound relatively uh, worse, blunted and compressed. Relatively soft materials such as carbon fiber, brass and hardwood (kind of an oxymoron in this example). The shape of BDR cones is all wrong, too. The correct shape is a ballistic shape a la Super DH (Diamond Hardness) Cone or the robust Michael Green brass cone.

“Because it’s what I choose to believe.” - Dr. Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus

”Everything is relative.” - A. Einstein